The vehicle came in ordnance yellow from Mardon, many years ago. I had ordered it in Panzer gray, but it came in yellow by mistake. But I always intended to build it as a late summer of ’42 vehicle. In that time frame my many Panzer gray vehicles made for 1940 and 1941, would be able to “support” this time window a little later in the war. I usually make my vehicles generic, to represent more than one unit, but towards the end, I decided to add the 16th Panzer Division insignia to the tank. Reading up on the 16th Panzer Division, it provided a nice time and place scenario for an Ausf L Panzer III. The 16th Panzer Division ended up in the deathole that was Stalingrad later, but in August it was still racing across Ukraine, eventually getting to the northern area of Stalingrad. Found some references of the 16PzDiv being in a place called Artemivsk (also Artemorsk, 55 miles from Donetsk and 360 miles west from Stalingrad) in early August. Looking at images of the area of Artemivsk, I found the vegetation to be similar to my backyard (plenty of green, deciduous trees, no barren steppes) so the time line was set. For these images I used some old tanker figures, but the tank will eventually get its own crew down the line.

The tank has all its engine grills, tools, tow cables, jack and jack block, upgraded with pieces from 1/6 Scale Icons. Front and rear Notek are the metal pieces by Armorpax as are the jack brackets. Also from Armorpax is the resin fire extinguisher with Michigan Dawgs decals.As usual I painted the tank in a bottoms up approach, first adding texture to the undersides and lower areas. Painted the running gear and tracks, then flipped the vehicle, covered the lower areas, and continued painting and detailing the top areas of the model. For the national insignia, numbers and divisional insignia, I used home made stencils. Weathered as usual and added a lot of what I call “micro washes” to bring out the details of all the elements of the vehicle.

That's truly outstanding....!!Always glad to see your collection of weathered and detailed vehicles, and as always great history lesson on what you create. Fantastic job.... Can't wait to see the crew that you gather for this....

I must echo Ken on this....I would have never thought a Mardon could ever look this beautiful!Thanks for posting, and as always, you are a true inspiration to all of us with your exquisite works of 1:6 art!

This is one of my favorite German Tanks. I use your methods of painting my vehicles, as I fin that the results are much better than what I used to do. I would love to be able to buy one of these at some point. Thanks for sharing this here with us.

Here the full crew for this PzIII Ausf L:Somewhat unusual for me, they all have DID HS, instead of DML HS. They are typical of summer tank crews in the Eastern Front. All the uniform parts are from DML, except for the shoulder boards that are from Dave Tedesco (Patches of Pride).